


Just Above the Surface

by Besagew



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon Compliant, Consensual Mind Control, Dom/sub Undertones, F/M, Femdom, Force Bond (Star Wars), Inappropriate Use of the Force, Kidnapping, Kissing, Non-Sexual Submission, Power Imbalance, Self-Esteem Issues, Under-negotiated Kink
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-07-23
Updated: 2019-07-23
Packaged: 2020-07-12 04:08:52
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19939972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Besagew/pseuds/Besagew
Summary: After their clash on the Supremacy, Rey kidnaps Kylo Ren’s unconscious body and takes him with her. His obedience demands careful negotiation.He is not used to freedom, away from the dark, but he finds stability in serving his new mistress.





	Just Above the Surface

_Because of willfulness,_  
_People sit in jail,_  
_The trapped bird's wings are tied,_  
_Fish sizzle in the skillet._  
\- Rumi

When they clash on Snoke’s ship, his grandfather’s lightsaber explodes between them, leaving him unconscious and her unsure. 

The thought of abandoning him there, helpless on his stomach in a ship falling to pieces, feels impossible to her. So, as the last bright sparks fall to the ground, Rey grits her teeth and pulls Ben to the escape craft, using his own clothes to drag him. 

On Jakku, she’d often dragged burdens too heavy for her. It should have been exhausting to move him, but it surprises her how much easier it is to pull him across the polished durasteel of the First Order flagship than it is to drag heavy salvage through sand. He is a tall man, broad and heavy with muscle, but there is little resistance and the Force—her very feelings—makes it possible.

She wants him with her, alive. She wants to steal Ben Solo away from Kylo Ren and make sure they are never left alone again. It is the only hope left inside her, now—now that she knows for certain her parents will never come back—and she is desperate for it. Her cheeks are still wet.

He owes her something to hope for. He had forced her to admit it to herself, that they had sold her. It still seems bigger than she can grasp, like trying to understand the true enormity of the galaxy, and she chokes on a pathetic sob as she pulls his weight, hearing the enormous wounded superstructure keen and groan around them.

She’s seen what hopelessness can do to people. It makes scavengers on Jakku just walk out into the badlands without water or food, searching for death.

That same kind of hopelessness had turned young Ben Solo to Snoke, she thinks. He had nowhere else to go, and no one else to turn to. So he’d walked into his own desert with no food or water, to starve the boy he was, to become something else, something dark and monstrous. 

Rey can feel the same kind of chasm opening beneath her, the horrible truth about her parents threatening to consume her. 

If she lets it, she knows it will. 

She will never have a family. They didn’t want her.

Her hands grip him tighter. He wants her. He is right, at least about that. 

They can stand if they lean up against each other, like two rock pillars with crumbling foundations.

It makes sense to her, and it feels right in the Force even as she bumps him on accident pulling him on the escape pod.

When she meets up with the _Falcon_ , Chewie spends long seconds staring down at Ben before he finally scoops Ben up in his arms like a child and carries him to the _Falcon’s_ crew quarters.

  
-

Ben doesn’t wake up until they are safe and well on their way. Then he jolts with a huge intake of breath, jerking around to find his bearings. An affronted look dawns across his face.

“Where am I?” he demands.

“The _Falcon_. I’ve taken you with me.”

“The _Falc_ —“ he chokes, and sits up. “No.”

“It’s over, Ben,” she says, still raw from what had come before. “You lost. I won.”

His shock settles into raw hurt. “Then you should have left me there. You didn’t want—” 

— _what I offered you._ She hears his unspoken thought, so loud it is projected right in her mind. _You didn’t want me._

“That’s right. I didn’t.” She doesn’t want the galaxy, or to rule it at his side.

Ben flinches, rocketing from the seat, pushing away from her in a burst of movement. He faces away from her in the crew quarters, tortured in the Force.

After a few pained seconds, something in him crystallizes. He half-turns, a tangible gasp of hope emanating from him, friable and brittle. “But you still brought me here. With you. Why?”

She thinks of telling him about how his face had looked in that vision of the future—solid and clear. Scarred, but so peaceful. She thinks of telling him he is destined to belong, just as long as he has her help. That nothing could be wrong, as long as they have that much right. She knows it.

But she remembers his harshness, how he planned to reorder the galaxy even while extending a hand to her with pleading eyes, and instead she says, “I stole you away, just like you kidnapped me from Takodana. I call it even.”

“So I’m a prisoner.”

“You’re my guest.” She echoes his words from days ago—lifetimes ago, it felt like.

He considers her for long moments, feeling her in the Force. “I told you to kill the past,” he says, voice resonant and bitter. “As long as you’ve been alive, clinging to the past has only ever hurt you, held you back. Kept you stuck in that desert. You couldn’t move on or grow up or do anything but wait, but you still refused to let go. You knew clinging to it was wrong, and it’s still wrong. And now you’re forcing me to go your way when you wouldn’t deign to consider mine.”

She can hear her heart thrumming in her ears. He is pressing her bruises on purpose to test what will bend. She won’t bend. “I don’t have some sinister plan for the galaxy like you do. I’m only trying to help you.”

This does not impress him. “So impulsiveness and recklessness will guide us toward your shining future where I’ve turned to the Light.”

Shocked tears spring into her eyes. “Don’t—” Rey feels like she’s been crying for days, on the edge of a new emotional cliff every time she falls off the old. “Don’t talk about my vision like that, like it’s not real. I saw it.”

He presses his lips together, staring at the teary eyes he caused—feeling the deep thrum of her pained hurt as his own. He doesn’t look away from the evidence of how upset he’d made her, and he doesn’t stop pressing her. But his voice loses part of the sardonic, barbed tone. “Have you thought of what will happen when you deliver Kylo Ren to the Resistance?”

She hadn’t, not really. 

She lifts her chin. “I will tell them Ben Solo killed the Supreme Leader of the First Order to save my life. I’m sure that will count for something.”

“And your plan for me is—what? For me to give up on everything I’ve worked for, everything I've become, and join those criminals in destabilizing the galaxy? To crawl back to my mother and beg for forgiveness?”

“I want you to be good,” Rey snaps, her voice still damp and wavering. “And so do you. You want to be good. I can feel it.”

He looks torn, turning to anger—an instant, white-hot anger that curls up through him like lightning, turning his breath to pants.

Igniting his weapon, Ben escapes the crew quarters, and she blinks, hearing him screaming bloody murder outside, and then a lightsaber slicing through metal to go with the screaming.

Rey chases after him, the damage hitting her with a swoop of horror in her stomach—great bright red gouges from floor to ceiling in the curved white hallway of his father’s precious ship. Dimly, she can hear Chewie roaring in outrage from the cockpit.

“You can’t do that!” she screams, beyond herself, and she barrels into him, but too late—he is already done with his outburst, dropping his lightsaber on the floor and curling in on himself. She glares down at him, shaking. “You’re going to fix that!”

He doesn’t seem to hear her. “You’ve made me powerless.”

“I _saved_ you.” She clenches one hand into a fist. “And now you’re with me. You don't have to be alone anymore.”

Ben tilts like a giant Star Destroyer half-buried in the sand. He shifts but catches himself. Resentment and longing and pain flow from him, thick enough that it makes her eyes prick again.

She gentles, and then reaches down to touch his hair the way she has wanted to do for days. It is softer than she imagined and thicker than her own. “I promise, Ben. I swear it.”

At her touch, he tenses and looks up at her, carefully blank in the Force, like a startled animal. He considers her carefully, his mouth trembling, and finally releases a breath. Giving in to her.

“We'll see,” he murmurs.

She feels an unexpected flush of victory, warm and sweet in her belly. It reminds her of Starkiller, in the trees and snow, when she had him at her mercy.

As Chewie flies low on Crait to reconnoiter with the Resistance, Ben says dryly, “When they shoot me on sight, bury me on Chandrila.”

Rey frowns, seeing the corner of his mouth twitch. “They won’t, not if you behave yourself. Don’t make me put binders on you like you did to me.”

He shoots her a shocked look and, for whatever reason, he radiates embarrassment, his ears and neck turning red.

At least he seems subdued. She doesn’t have time to think about it.

—

Rey’s plan is half-baked at best, and she’d be the first to admit it. But that doesn’t stop her from expecting it to be easier.

Ben Solo would return to his mother and be adopted into the Resistance, freed from his inner turmoil and transformed into the Resistance's greatest asset, their secret to victory, living proof that light can overcome darkness. He would find his way out of his torment and be happy.

Instead, the Resistance locks him up.

Ben Solo does not speak a word during the chaos that ensues when Kylo Ren steps out of the _Millennium Falcon_ into the Resistance Base on Crait.

The Resistance draws weapons, shouting warnings as Rey steps bodily in between.

She can feel Ben’s eyes on the back of her head as she speaks. “Kylo Ren killed Supreme Leader Snoke. He wants to defect from the First Order.”

“That’s a lot to swallow, lady,” says a stranger with curly black hair whose grip on his blaster hasn’t shifted a millimeter from Ben since he locked eyes on him.

“Kylo Ren is the only son of Leia Organa and Han Solo.”

“And I’m the queen of Naboo. You brought him here, inside the base, putting the entire Resistance in jeopardy.”

Rey can tell the Resistance fighters take their cue from that curly-haired man, and that they don’t know what to think of her—they don’t know her well in the first place, and she hasn’t succeeded in her mission to retrieve Luke Skywalker for their cause. Instead, she’s come back with his wayward nephew.

After so many days of dealing with Luke and Ben, Rey is tired to death of convincing bullheaded men to see reason. “You have to listen to me. There isn’t time.”

“She’s right,” says a woman’s voice behind them. “We don’t know when they’re going to come.”

Rey feels Ben freeze.

Leia is elegant, limned in the white light.

Rey feels Ben’s wash of unmitigated relief, and then his wave of anger, and then a whole torrent of feelings too complicated and strong to pick apart as his mother stares up at her adult son’s face for the first time.

“Ben,” Leia tries, but Ben turns away from her with a jerk.

“Whoa, whoa, where do you think you’re going, buddy?” the same stranger interjects and pulls Ben’s arms behind his back. 

Ben does nothing to resist, does nothing except duck his head away from his mother.

“Get your hands off him,” Rey warns.

The man shoots her a grim look. “You say he killed Snoke, and that’s a good story if it’s true, but he was fighting pretty damn hard for the First Order not even a few hours ago. He blew up a lot of good people, killed a lot of my good friends. So excuse me if I’m a little slow to trust. I’m taking him to the brig. Alright, Leia?”

Rey has Ben’s lightsaber on her own belt, and she itches to use it as she did before, to raise it up and just scream in a temper until they leave them the hell alone.

Leia puts a restraining hand on Rey’s arm, so Rey hesitates. They are already dragging him away, and there is nothing she can do to stop them.

—

They lock Ben in one of the cavern rooms in the heart of the old Rebel base, leaving him kneeling in chains with guards posted outside. When she’s allowed in to see him, he is exposed to view on all sides with binders tight on his wrists, and there is even what looks like a restraining circlet in a band around his head.

Rey frowns. It’s excessive.

Ben nods up toward the restraining circlet around his head. “An emperor’s crown, exchanged for this.”

The metallic circlet of tech is used to keep dangerous prisoners restrained—if the prisoner moves or makes a conscious plan to escape, they are shocked. Rey is surprised the old Rebel base would have something like that on hand.

“Emperor? Is that what you would have called yourself?”

“I could have been anything I wanted.”

“You would have been miserable.”

“How do you know?” The question is churlish.

Rey’s answer is shameless and certain. “Because I wouldn’t have been there.”

Ben’s mouth opens and then closes again. There are many things he can say to that—cruel things to cut her down, denials—but he says none of them and looks anywhere but at her.

“And you were miserable already,” Rey points out.

“Because I wasn’t in control. It would have been different. We would have been free, and no one would have ever hurt us again. We could have changed everything that had ever wronged us.”

“It was the wrong way. We’ll do it here instead.”

He shakes his bound wrists pointedly at her, eyes narrowed to slits. “I can’t change anything as a prisoner.”

“I’ll speak for you.”

“Yeah, you’ve done well with that so far.”

Behind his sardonic tone is something else—fear. It is clear as day, even with the barrier between them. A familiar fear fills his heart, just as it had that very first time she’d looked into his mind.

Rey sits on the ground, folding her legs in a meditative position. “Don’t be afraid,” she tells him.

He looks taken aback, the way he had when she first examined his mind and saw his greatest fear.

Rey leans forward. “You kept me safe when that old worm ordered you to kill me. I’m paying back the favor. I won’t let them hurt you.”

“You against the entire Resistance.” His voice is flat.

Rey shrugs. “If I had to fight the entire Resistance, I’d free you first. We’re not so bad a team when we fight together.”

That brings up memories of their synchronicity, their perfect unison, their spirits soaring with purpose together, the ferocity of the struggle, his triumph in her blood, his heated gaze across the battlefield—

 _No_ , she doesn’t want to think about that.

He stares at her as if he is thinking of exactly that. “It wasn’t a favor,” he says finally.

Rey blinks.

“When I killed Snoke,” he continues. “I didn’t do it so you’d be in my debt.” 

“You did it because you want to turn.”

Ben shakes his head firmly. “No.”

Rey frowns, not understanding, but feeling something approaching, far off but building steadily. “Then why?”

His mouth trembles. Presses. “Because we’re the same.”

The statement hangs in the air, vibrating. His words have the same sureness that Rey felt in her vision of his future. When they touched hands, a gift had been given to him, a different but equal miracle. 

He knows something, and he glimmers with it. Rey can see it in his eyes.

She breaks away first, flustered.

He opens his mouth to say something more, something she can feel bearing down like a storm front that will change everything in its path, of a tidal wave that will crash down on the beach of her.

She has to stop him.

She can’t bear another wave like that, not so soon.

She stands up, loud and hurried, before he can speak. Remembering how he had calmed with her hand in his hair earlier, she presses a hand to his shoulder, which is solid and wide. At her touch, he jolts and tenses, then he stares up at her, wide-eyed. His chest moves under her palm as he takes in fast, shallow breaths through his mouth.

Rey soothes him with her thumb. “That’s the same reason why I’ll protect you now. Just stay here for now. Work with them. Trust that I’ll take care of you.”

He hesitates, and some instinct draws her to slide her hand up to his neck, to touch his warm bare skin, the indentation of his scar. Without conscious thought, her other hand goes to rest on the hilt of his wide saber on her own waist. 

“Do you hear me, Ben? Will you be good?”

She can feel it under her palm—his body shudders slightly. His gloved fingers are digging into his knees.

He studies her, and that look in his eyes is still there, lying in wait. His tongue wets his lips. “I’ll do as you wish.”

That strange, heady rush goes through her again. “Good, Ben.” 

She feels it again under her palm, a shudder going through him, a hitch in his breath. She’s short of breath; she’s not sure what’s happening—but that he would bow to her, it makes her feel—

It makes her feel powerful. It makes her feel truly in control for the first time, after a lifetime of instability, of nothing ever being a sure thing.

It feels good, having his complete attention, feeling him sway and strain toward her like a flower to daylight, having him search her face desperately for the slightest clue of what she wants from him. 

Having him need her. And want her.

She stole him away, and now he’s hers. She won’t ever have to wait for him. She won’t have to worry he’ll leave.

He’ll stay. He’ll do as she wishes.

She looks at his lips, hearing her own heart as loud as thunder.

But it’s all so sudden, so _much_ , she can’t—

She lets him go and stumbles back.

He looks startled and then crestfallen, as if she’d offered something to him, something he’d wanted all his life, but then snatched it back before he could get even a small taste. “Rey,” he pants. “Wait.”

Rey pauses warily, feeling as if a trap will be sprung on her if she waits a moment longer. She can sense wave almost over her head now.

That intense glimmer in his eye is awake. “I want something. If I do this.”

She frowns. “If you do this, you’ll be freed and you’ll be a good person. And you’ll be my friend.”

His head shakes. “I want something else.”

“What else,” Rey hears herself ask, “do you want?”

His eyes are demanding. “You know what I want.”

“I—” She clenches her hands into fists. “No, I don’t.”

“Rey, I want you to kiss me.”

She can hear the blood rush in her ears, dimly.

He is defiant, keyed on her like a bird of prey. It is clear Ben expects her to refuse him, but he is driven to say it anyway. There is vindictive pleasure in his voice, as if it is enough that he control this, that he watch her face as he forces her to acknowledge him as a man. He is shaking with tension, almost in a rage already at her imagined rejection.

He bites out, “If I do all of this for you, that’s how you’ll pay me back.”

“What happened to ‘we’re the same?’ Now you want me to pay you?” She is desperate to distract him. Her chest is clenching with something like disappointment. Something like terror, with heat flushing her face.

A trace of bitterness crosses his features. “If you really thought we were the same, you’d kiss me just because I want it. But I understand you. You understand debt and payment. And reward.”

He sounds as serious as he would be bartering for something he needs to live, like portions of food. He looks as if any moment, he will try to stand to go after her, crown or no crown, shock or no.

She hears herself answer. “Maybe what you really want is to earn it. You know you need to be good first to deserve that.”

This time, she doesn’t need to be touching him to visibly see the surprised shiver that runs through him. “Then you’ll do it?” he gasps.

“I will. If you’re good,” she says.

It’s nothing; he’s asking for a small thing.

Rey knows it’s not a small thing to him. His face is shining with something like hope.

She escapes from the room. During the work that must be done after that, she doesn’t allow herself to think about it, about how if he is good and cooperates, he will expect her to kiss him. How he wants such a small thing enough that he traded his obedience for it.

A shiver goes through her.

She does all she can to keep so busy she can't think about it.


End file.
